A place for couples dealing with illness to find resources and advice, hear stories, and discover support. Whether the illness is chronic or acute, the result of disease or accident, couples can learn strategies for coping with the changes illness brings into our relationships and our worlds.
The information provided in this blog is for educational and support purposes only. It should not be used as a substitute for seeking professional care.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Do You Maintain or Reduce Your Meds?

I'm not even sure why I do this, but I am continually trying to reduce my pain medication.

I stabilize for a period of time, and then I try to taper. I drop a few pills and then I begin to feel tiny ripples of pain - I call them guppy ripples. At that point either I pay attention to them and go back up to the last medication level at which I was stable; or I pretend they are indigestion, try to ignore them for a week or so. Too often the guppies then turn into barracudas, and I have to increase the med dosage beyond where it was when I began to taper. Sometimes, though, I can successfully taper, and this then justifies my next attempts to cut down on meds.

Richard has learned that his voice needs to be a quiet one during these medication experiments. He reminds me of my doctor's perpetual advice to of just stay stable at the level of meds I'm on. At some point I ignore his counsel and do my thing. If (or when) I suffer the consequences, he just holds me and reminds me that I had stabiity and can have it again.

If you're the ill partner, how do you manage your medication? And if you're the well partner what role, if any, do you play around medication matters?

1 comment:

I will admit I have been guilty of that. Especially when I was on a medication that was not generic and cost a lot of money. I would be on it for a while and then I would start to feel like I was no longer feeling any more benefit from it so I would taper off it and say like I'd take it every other day or sometimes cut the pills in 1/2 but then after a while I'd really start to pay for it big time and then realize that saving money was not worth it. After several months though I asked the doctor to find me something that worked the same but was generic and he researched and finally came up with something. It didn't work as well and he had to increase the dose but in the end it still ended up being cheaper. But I would imagine there are a lot of other people out there that have done the same thing to save money. Thats the main reason why I did it.

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About Me

In November, 1999 I was whacked with a mysterious chronic pain syndrome that took me out of my life. With the help of my husband, my dog, and a combination of western and alternative approaches, I have a new life that includes working, writing, mountain climbing, smiling, and managing pain. I learned a lot along the way, especially about illness and the couple relationship. I'm also a psychotherapist, a business consultant, and have written a book about couples and illness, which was published in March 2013 (Roundtree Press)

“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”Susan Sontag